Newly Released CIA Documents Prove Pelosi Knew About Water Boarding

Last April Nancy Pelosi sparked a furor when she claimed that the CIA was always lying to Congress. She also claimed that she was briefed by Bush administration officials on the legal justification for using water boarding, but they never told her the technique was actually being used. It was Nancy Pelosi version of “I tried it but I never inhaled.”

“In that or any other briefing we were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used. What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel opinions that they could be used,”

As you can see by this “cut out” (above) from the report given to congress by the National Intelligence Director this week, on September 4th 2002 Nancy Pelosi had a

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

Now there is new evidence that the Speaker of the House is lying. In the documents released this week as Attorney General’s pogrom against the CIA, there was more evidence that Pelosi was briefed about water boarding and did not complain at the time:

Public Trust: What did the speaker know, and when did she know it? With CIA documents contradicting Nancy Pelosi’s claims on classified briefings, will a death watch begin on her leadership?

The newly declassified CIA report on the interrogation of Islamist terrorists notes “in the fall of 2002, the agency briefed the leadership of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of both standard techniques and EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques).”

The CIA, according to the report, “continued to brief the leadership of the Intelligence Oversight Committees on the use of EITs and detentions in February and March 2003.”

And here’s the zinger: “The general counsel says that none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the program . . . .”

For months, Speaker Pelosi has claimed she and other high-ranking Democrats in Congress who were briefed by the CIA during President Bush’s first term “were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used.”

Others present with her at CIA intelligence briefings, like former House Intelligence Committee Chairman and CIA director Porter Goss, say otherwise.

Her credibility was also rattled by the revelation that Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat who succeeded Pelosi as ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, sent a classified letter to the CIA in February 2003 objecting to EITs.

Speaker Pelosi’s behavior reeks of the kind of cynicism and hypocrisy Americans have become used to seeing in Washington.

Her liberal instincts were to object to the CIA’s tough interrogation of terrorists.

But those briefings took place not long after the 9/11 attacks; the war in Afghanistan, home to al-Qaida and shelter for Osama bin Laden, was going well; and the Iraq War had not yet begun.

So there was no way for an ambitious politician like Pelosi to know which way the political winds would end up blowing.

At the time, President Bush was basking in popularity, and the nation was in lockstep behind his aggressive approach to waging the global war on terror — including in Iraq. For all Pelosi knew, it might stay that way for many years to come.

So she stayed quiet, keeping her options open. Now, with Democrats running the whole show in Washington and a Justice Department poised to criminalize CIA interrogators in a politicized national security witch hunt, she has chosen to revert to those liberal instincts.

It also means turning hero interrogators, and the architects of the interrogation strategy, into scapegoats.

We have long warned that the revelations of this deceit, now fully confirmed by CIA documentation, mean there’s a cancer growing on the speakership. The question now is how long it will take other Democratic leaders to get out of denial and do something about it.

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